I have had a lot of interesting leadership opportunities during my time as a USC student. Through these opportunities, I have gotten the chance to meet a variety of students with goals both similar and different from my own, who come from a multitude of backgrounds, and who have challenged me to serve and lead in better ways each and every day. The best example of such an opportunity was serving as a University 101 Peer Leader in the fall semester of my senior year. I initially intended to return to the Resident Mentor role I had held my sophomore year the following year, but due to some personal struggles, I felt it was best if I stepped away and focused on myself before taking on such a serious responsibility. After going through my junior year without a major mentoring role, I really missed having a relationship with first-year students. I felt that I could fill that gap nicely with a peer leader role and an opportunity within the University 101 office was highly appealing. This was one instance where I could not have been more correct!

 

It happened that I already knew an instructor who was looking for a peer leader, so after securing the job, I reached out to her, we worked out the details, and we began looking forward to working together in the fall. What I began to realize right off the bat was that I would need to use a very different skillset to be successful in U101 than I needed to use to be successful in my RM role (and for that matter, in any other leadership role). Though some skills were transferrable, I needed to learn how to balance my relationship with my co-instructor, Meredith, with that of my students. This, I realized, would be significantly more challenging than I could have ever anticipated. 

 

With other leadership roles I have had on campus, students are granted a lot more freedom and independence, while with a peer leader role you are a lot more “in the spotlight” and you really have to make conscience decisions and be aware that not only are your students watching you, but your co-instructor is as well and you need to conduct yourself with decorum. It was hard for me to manage what I viewed as a multi-faceted relationship. I wanted it to look exactly the same as the relationships I had in the past with first-year students, but the peer leader role was naturally more formalized and required more complex relationship management than I had initially prepared myself for. It became really challenging for me to remember my purpose as a peer leader. As I dragged myself up the Main Street hill three times a week in the 90 degree heat, I struggled to remember why I was in that classroom trying to help 19 first-year students connect with USC.

 

I knew that because Meredith had previously had so many successful years as an instructor and I could see how incredible the students in my class were, I knew it was me who needed to change my mindset. The change came when I was discussing a course with a friend. She was currently enrolled and I had taken it the previous spring. The course was Management 403 and I will always consider it to be one of the most influential and life-changing classes I have ever taken. It is not taught like a traditional management class; it does not focus so much on theories and such like that, but rather on concepts and leadership skills that are still conceptual ideas, but can be applied in a variety of ways in both your personal and professional life. Something we talked about in class that would later resonated with my peer leader struggles was servant leadership. Professor Hanly defined servant leadership as “placing service before self-interest by focusing on what is feasible to accomplish”. This concept really resonated with me. I think people believe that the focus of management majors is solely on soft skills. Servant leadership is a concept that is on the fine line between being a soft skill and being a more conceptual theory. The way it is discussed in class, servant leadership encompasses a multitude of theories: the four leadership motives, task-related attitudes, relationship-oriented behaviors, the 360-degree feedback chart, and a variety of leadership style theories, but it comes back to being that simple, one line definition.

 

Essentially, what this conversation with my friend helped me realize is that servant leadership was really what I had signed up to do when I interviewed to be a peer leader. Once I made that connection to Management 403, things began to change. I remembered how my professor emphasized how you inspired trust in people when you yourself were trustworthy so I opened up to my students and shared honest stories of my first-year experience with them, even when it might have compromised my influence. My professor told us how listening was important in servant leadership – you needed to listen first in order to express and show your confidence in others. Without listening and trust, you had nothing. I started to go early to class so that I could talk to whoever was there and listen to them. Though it was not always easy, I started to place my service to my students before my own immediate self-interest and I began to see my own happiness in my role improve. It was so incredible to see the impact of that concept in real life application. 

 

Another valuable application from Management 403 was the DiSC Assessment we did earlier in the semester. I found that reevaluating the results of the DiSC Assessment I took in Management 403 the year prior to be a helpful aid in managing my peer leader role. My DiSC results peg me as the “inspirational pattern”, which means I am charismatic, persuasive, and change orientated, but lack conscientiousness and tactfulness. This was especially helpful when it came to the management of my relationship with my co-instructor. While we have known each other for over three years now, we have very different personalities and that can make working together interesting at times and we often had different approaches. I struggle a lot with being tactful and empathetic while my co-instructor, Meredith, is extremely kind and always thinking of others first. I had to remember my DiSC results at times when I would get frustrated with the differences between mine and Meredith’s personality, always remembering that she has some of the qualities I have always wished to see in myself. 

 

Overall, I have had some great experiences in leadership roles across campus. I have had the incredible ability to leave a legacy upon this university and do so in a way that has impacted me as well. My U101 peer leader experience is merely the tip of the iceberg. At the end of day, it has not always been easy to have such a busy four years on this campus, but for it to have been so satisfying and fulfilling was worth it. To remember the reason that we all worked so hard made every day worth it. In the case of my peer leader experience, I consider it a great help to have had such an inspiring professor in Management 403 to teach my lessons of both professional importance and personal importance. It is connections like these that have made being a student leader so important to me.